jeredb.com

Happy holidays!

my current painting philosophy capture in a poem:

a song on repeat,
brush held anti-bristle-ward,
arm extended.
let the paint talk,
“be bold”
trust your hand and eye.
water for a man lost to the desert.

I’m realizing that, in those friendships, there’s no shared ritual. Our points of connection depend on one of us having the time and energy to make the effort. It’s okay that our conversations, or our times together, are sporadic. Sometimes that’s simply all we have available.

Annie Mueller, on the rituals that make friendships sustainable.

I hike almost every weekend with a friend, sometimes it is 3 miles, and other times it is 5. We talk about life, politics, and football. The ritual of the hike creates opportunities, and deliberate space, for these conversations, and that is what is critical in maintaining the friendship. Creating and holding space, as my wife would say.

As Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter seems to be a grand way to waste millions of dollars, I have decided to resurrect my blog.

So, I’m back online. I have not deleted my accounts on Twitter, but I haven’t logged in in years. I am worried that my username would eventually get recycled and that someone would be “me” online. The same with Instagram.

I have been awful at using my blog, my microblog, and social media as a whole. I think partly that is due to my want to feed into the air-quote content air-quote creation game. I didn’t want to create things for other people’s platforms. I’ve gone back and forth over years, wanting to share and post, and almost immediately running out of steam, losing interest, or hearing about some privacy thing that immediately makes me regret any commitment. But this is my blog. I can share what I want because it is hosted someplace but under my name.

So, this is Jeredb.com. It is my blog.

Like it says as the “tagline”, I have thoughts. I guess I am sharing them now.

It is hosted on Micro.blog, where it has been for a few years. I like the simplicity, and it has been, all things considered, very stable. I added an online status checker (sitestatus.jeredb.com), and if you see a recent downtime, that was because I boogered a DNS thing up. Part of the reason why I like Micro.blog, there is so much less for me to fiddle with. I am trying to turn this blog into something, so I am trying to make it more comfortable, but not overly fiddly. I will go hard on fiddling, but not writing. There are some minor changes to the theme (Marfa), but it is pretty standard. I am going to try to keep it that way.

I have added a status widget (up there 👆🏻). The status widget is powered by omg.lol. This is my equivalent of a “tweet”, “toot”, or other fleeting post. These are ephemeral, little insights, and while they are captured, they are not part of the “blog.” As the omg.lol team adds more features to their quirky services, I may add more features added to this blog, but who knows. My first future thought is that I may use the omg.lol weblog feature to create the Micro.blog /now page equivalent. Finally, I clicked a button to make this blog Mastodon compatible. I’m not really sure what that means right now.

I also have set up a separate blog to catalog my painting. You can find it at jeredb.studio. It is going to be solely focused on my painting. It has most of my paintings to date, and I may write about my creative process and inspiration. The painting blog will be more pictures than words, but as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

I guess you can say it is good to be back.